I think part of getting better in the contest is remembering 'patterns' of some sort. I'm remembering 'word shapes', where Graffiti users remember character shapes and Fitaly users probably remember 'hand movement shapes' of some kind.

Looking at the Octave window actually slows me down, yes.

Btw: Some of the words have really beautiful shapes, like 'chance' (West-North-W-N-W-Northeast) or 'entry' (which is a bit weird, though).